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iOS Engineer
Senior iOS Engineer – Mobile Apps
About the Role
Starling is the UK’s first and leading digital bank, on a mission to fix banking by building a new kind of financial service—fairer, easier to use, and designed to demystify money. We merge the technological agility of a fast-moving tech company with the security and rules of a fully licensed UK bank. With over 3,000 employees across our London, Southampton, Cardiff, and Manchester offices, we empower our technologists to drive innovation, collaborate, and ship disruptive fintech solutions.
As a studiosized banking brand, we thrive on a flat organizational structure: self-driven individuals own their work, from building and shipping products to mentoring others. Our five core values—Listen, Keep It Simple, Do The Right Thing, Own It, and Aim For Greatness—define how we foster a culture of responsibility, transparency, and customer obsession.
Our engineers operate at the frontier of fintech, working in a high-energy hybrid environment (minimum 1-day in-office per week for Tech teams) to design bold solutions—from backend infrastructure to customer-facing mobile apps. You’ll see your impact nearly instantaneously: our apps are downloaded by 300K+ users, retaining a 4.9/5 average rating, and engineers write production-ready code from day one.
Why Many Mobile Engineers Here
- Full iOS ownership: Build the entire banking experience (securities, spends, savings, and beyond) in Swift with UIKit, leveraging leading-edge design principles (minimal dependencies, clear architecture).
- Empowered developers: Debug yourself from day one—with minimal hand-holding.
- Gradual growth: Projects scale naturally as you contribute, with career progression carefully aligned with performance.
- Reward for ambition: We aim for entrepreneurial responsibility—promote junior engineers who take the initiative, innovate, or mentor others.
Hybrid Working
A hybrid approach is the default at Starling. Tech staff are expected to attend office at least one day a week to foster collaboration and in-person innovation.
Engineering Environment & Culture
- Tech-driven: We ship hundreds of daily feature releases to a growing userbase (300K+). Engineers focus on inclusion, accessibility, scalability, and clarity, delivering polished features like payments, cash management, and finance education—every day.
- Self-owned: No micromanagement—technology teams decide how to build solutions to accelerate innovation.
- Diverse tools: From Java (server-side) to Swift (mobile), with a rich tech stack including (but not limited to):
- iOS development: Swift, UIKit (comprehensive experience required); occult exceptions optimised for stability.
- Mobile Architecture: Our native apps follow MVVM-C, a customised approach guaranteeing modularity, testability, and code reuse.
- Feature priorisation: iOS folk work closely with backend and product teams to shape product life cycle— aligning security and robustness with deadlines.
- Bottom-up leadership: Engineers are encouraged to lead with their own ideas, architecture choices, and improvements proactively while teaming up across groups.
About Our iOS Environment
Our iOS application is 100% custom-written in Swift, embedded in complex financial systems that demand scalability, robustness, and security. Our priorities:
- Thrive amid pressure: Ship hard problems ahead of scheduling; bugs are avoided through clean, tested, collaborative-upgraded code and stricter release cycles.
- "Less complexity is always better": The iOS engineers share the core mindset of our company mission—to build a trusted fintech solution by eliminating needless friction—through simpler paradigms.
Our tools & libraries:
- RxSwift: our reactive programming tool (but not a hard dependency—open to opinions).
- SnapKit: one of several autolayout options, though we’ve built an in-house DSL to allow SwiftUI like decarations to UIKit code.
- Realm: dominant object database, layered with an active caching/device synchronization system.
- Sourcery / SwiftGen: Non-intrusive code generation utilities for bundling assets & bridging.
- SwiftFormat / SwiftLint / Danger ensure disciplined cfd (by being rigorous with our style and testability rules)
- Managed Agencies: Simplified onboarding flows,uds environment, and external refactors (personal responsibility).
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Your Role
We are looking for senior iOS engineers ready to build intelligent systems for millions of users.
Key Responsibilities
- Build robust apps that comply with financial laws, security standards, and accessibility requirements.
- Solve end-to-end problems with cross-functionality, mirroring the dynamics of UK banking standards.
- Own features from initiation-to-release, authoring and reviewing test cases.
- Participate actively in a peer review-driven culture to assess performance, improvements, and roadblocks efficiently.
- Profit & sharpen collaboration with backend development (core systems, APIs, databases) and UI/UX design.
- Innovate: Drive better developer productivity with controlled use of Swift and UIKit.
You’ll Love This If
✔ You’re a mission-driven iOS Technical Background Leader. ✔ Your code is focused on Client requests—with plans to review & extend your project and scale securely for growth. ✔ You resonate with AIM FOR GREATNESS—delivery Rocky Mountain style-quality apps while focusing on ideas and values. ✔ Swift, UIKit, architectural clarity, and Xcode tools look like your playground. ✔ You’re willing to offer specification clarity by default.
Critical Differentiators
❖ Multi-layered ownership of systems (imagine achieving scale due to respect and consistency). ❖ Reliability: resiliency when under intense financial workflow—money is serious here! ❖ Anti-bugs: monitoring, observation, and proactive testing of critical financial flows. ❖ Collaborative continuous integration: TDD and use cases, libraries, and frameworks filled in-house with rarely seen acceptance quality. ❖ A drive for impactful design and clarity (considering customers: accessibility, clarity, seamlessness). ❖ Automation-first mind-set across developer lifecycles.
Technical Requirements
Essential
- iOS experience: Deep understanding of UIKit, its constraints, components, and throttling behaviours, and their interactions with Swift Combo logic.
- Swift stronghold: Excellent Swift for development, combining clarity with zen philosophy.
- Fluid agility: Flexibility in multi-daily iterations (Smart banks – mindful of downloads, speed, reliability!) combined with voluminous skills and knowledge in Core financial-sector verpflichtet.
- Collaborative & Problem-Solving willing to onshore-develop cross-team in when practical.
- Safety-first mindset: Financial gradation needs careful attention across: networks, logging, compliance, and integration bugs that could impact millions of users.
Nice to Know
- RxSwift: previous knowledge a ruler but nonetheless appreciated!
- MVVM or CQRS approaches—until heuristic experiences show elegant patterns.
- Shared experiences with in-app marketplace-like financial workflows or their complex solutions / partnership-friendly strategies.
*We support complexity acceptance but prefer shared belief that progressive, overcomplicating bloated based apps are against so of our values
What Grows Here?
If your experience meets our values or exceed them, you’ll be primed to grow organically and add significant value.
Requirements
- Profound knowledge of iOS: UIKit frameworks (remembering that they are not fully univocal).
- Design-driven: ambitious enough to understand how best our system-Ops will shine without sacrificing stable segments.
- Rediscover-or-crafted advanced **technical solutions that reflects our Open stance for infinite excitement—plus ways to simplify for scale, accuracy, and speed].
- Innovative mindset: clearness in communication and crafting interfaces that promote inclumity in design and powerful algorithms.
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Tools in the Workflow
Recent Key ProStreamTechnologies utilised within iOS focus:
- RxSwift for reactive applications
- SwiftUI’d structures overlapping the visibility scopes of UIKit. ( Seriously consideration of supplying co-existible code patterns.)
- SwiftGen/Sourcery for automatic image/string pulling and re-generation.
- Swift lint, dangers enable house keeps you clean and ships so routine ideally two-week-based conditions. Only : Every effort to simplify or modularize around production needs without skipping breadth short-term.
Realistically we continuously pursue a swift in atmosphere and add newer constructs/techniques to our ecosystem as they prove scalable and integrate with our core ethos.
Interview Process
Our interviews are a two-way street—we want you to have the same opportunity to get to know us as much as we get to know you. Expecting attentive conversation, not a test—not to be treated as random drills!` Our timeline:
- Phone Call (~45 mins): Let’s start by aligning interest priorities.
- Take-home Technical Test: no hard time pressure.
- Technical Face-to-Face (~1.5 hours): we’re hands-on thrilled to see upon opening your workstyle discussions.
- Final Interview (~45 mins): final align discussions with leadership aligned with project truths.
Going in with curiosity will help you stand out from the norm (in fintech!) Rule: Be inquisitive!
**Benefits
We prioritise your work-life balance—because it’s how you thrive.
Liberal Holiday Schedule
- 25+ paid days annual leave (plus public holiday flexibility)
- +1 day entitled by default as your permit holiday allowance to be useable whenever most convenient for you.
- Queue rewards: increase with years of service & buildability on your contract.
Pestival-Related Rewards
- 16 hours paid volunteer work a year – invest for aligned positive causes.
- Flexible benefits package: salary sacrifice for company-enhanced pension, life insurance at 4x your salary, plus group income protection.
Health & Wellbeing
- VitalityHealth Vitality membership (including mental health/cancer support, gym discounts), Private Medical Insurance.
- Exclusive discounts from Waitrose, Mr & Mrs Smith and Peloton.
Family-Friendly Initiatives
- Promote a work-life harmony policy drastically.
- Incentives: referral scheme rewarding referrals (! )
Other Perks
- Access to Perkbox: retail discounts + access to physical/mental health tools, congrulatory free weekly surprises.
- Travel & Sustainability: Cycle to Work; gym partnerships; EV leasing included.
About Us
Starling’s openness ensures it looks like you—offering you a welcome home for diverse backgrounds and iterations of motivation. Our work is designed to genuinely further each individual’s innate happiness and pride in their contribution together as one team solving problems.
Mission: We’re radically reshaping banking—paving a happier future for benchmarks today engineers.
Our Commitment
Starling is an equal opportunities employer. Explore with us regardless of race, religion, sexual orientation, or other individual differences. Inclusivity is a tenet of our mission to bring together the best diverse minds—crafting a forward-looking culture.
We want to connect with your infinite potential—applied intelligently in combination with our openness. This is a role you fit (maybe overqualified already or with high potential)! No need to tick every box—get in touch anyway.
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